The present invention concerns toiletries like soap for hand, body and surface use, as well as other cleaning products.
The amount of time needed to clean the skin or a surface has been researched extensively. The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) Guideline for Hand Washing and Hand Antisepsis in Health-Care Settings (1995) (Table 1), recommends a wash time of 10-15 seconds with soap or detergent for routine hand washing for general purposes. The APIC recommends an antimicrobial soap or detergent or alcohol-based rub wash for 10-15 seconds to remove or destroy transient micro-organisms in for example, nursing and food preparation applications. The APIC further recommends an antimicrobial soap or detergent with brushing for at least 120 seconds for surgical applications. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends up to 5 minutes of hand cleaning for surgical applications. Clearly, the length of time spend washing the hands can have a great effect on eradication of microbes. Thus there is a need for a cleaning formulation that will enable the user to judge how long he has washed his hands in order to comply with the guidelines.
Proper hand washing habits are important for children also. Children in particular need guidance in determining the appropriate amount of time hand washing should be performed. This guidance is generally given by parents or other caregivers and, while important, is not omni-present. In addition to parental guidance, various other mechanisms have been used to encourage longer hand washing times in children. Soaps have been formulated as foams, for example, to increase the enjoyment children find in hand washing and thus to increase the amount of time children spend in washing. Fragrances have also been used to make the hand washing experience more enjoyable. Dual chamber vessels have been used to produce a color change upon the mixing of the components. It has also been suggested that the reactants in the dual chamber system may alternatively be kept together with one component inactive by some means, such as by microencapsulation, until sufficient physical stimulus results in their effective mixing, or that the components be kept separate yet in one container through the use of a non-miscible mixture of two phases. These methods, though possible, are somewhat impractical and expensive. Far simpler would be a system that produces a color change which does not rely on a physical or phase separation to keep the components unmixed.
There is a need for a color changing toiletry or cleaning product that will provide a time delayed indication that a predetermined cleaning interval has passed after dispensing. There is a further need for a toiletry that is also fun for children to use. There is a further need for the color changing chemistry to be made from components that may be pre-mixed and packaged together for later dispensing from a single chamber vessel.